"
The stranger leaned forward and spoke more quickly. "We have never once
been taught by word or act to distinguish between religion and the moral
laws on which it has artfully fastened itself, and from which it has sucked
its vitality. When we have dragged down the weeds and creepers that
covered the solid wall and have found them to be rotten wood, we imagine
the wall itself to be rotten wood too. We find it is solid and standing
only when we fall headlong against it. We have been taught that all right
and wrong originate in the will of an irresponsible being. It is some time
before we see how the inexorable 'Thou shalt and shalt not,' are carved
into the nature of things. This is the time of danger."
His dark, misty eyes looked into the boy's.
"In the end experience will inevitably teach us that the laws for a wise
and noble life have a foundation infinitely deeper than the fiat of any
being, God or man, even in the groundwork of human nature.
"She will teach us that whoso sheddeth man's blood, though by man his blood
be not shed, though no man avenge and no hell await, yet every drop shall
blister on his soul and eat in the name of the dead. She will teach that
whoso takes a love not lawfully his own, gathers a flower with a poison on
its petals; that whoso revenges, strikes with a sword that has two edges--
one for his adversary, one for himself; that who lives to himself is dead,
though the ground is not yet on him; that who wrongs another clouds his own
sun; and that who sins in secret stands accursed and condemned before the
one Judge who deals eternal justice--his own all-knowing self.
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